The e-commerce website lost all rankings in the spam core algorithm update last August

robin222

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My e-commerce website, sharkwatchband(dot).com, lost all keyword rankings in the Google spam algorithm update last August.

The website index is normal; I haven't received any manual intervention or security issue notifications in the Google Search Console.

It's been 6 months now, and the website still hasn't regained its rankings. What could be the reason?
 
spam updates are usually backlinks-related, so you might want to start by checking your links all over again... check the anchors mostly, as the anchor texts are one of the most frequent triggers for penalties, so start with those...

Also, from the little research that I did it seems that this update specifically went after PBNs and other link schemes, so if you have PBN links pointing to your site you might want to either disavow those that got penalized, or outright remove them if it's possible.

At the same time have a look at the sites that your backlinks come from, because if those sites got de-indexed your backlinks will have become useless too, which is probably why you've tanked...

Something else you can do is compare the pages that lost rankings, traffic, impressions and / or clicks after the update, to themselves as they were before the update happened. Sometimes you can spot clear patterns / differences that can give away the reason for your penalty and, implicitly, you can also spot the fix as well, in terms of...

- remove penalized / deindexed backlinks
- fix (by removing, updating, creating) anchor texts
- create / remove / generally fix internal linkx
- etc...

If you do find something and you fix it, give it 2-3 weeks for the changes to reflect in the SERPs, otherwise - if no improvement shows up in rankings - either you've not fixed it, or you didn't fix the right thing :)

Sometimes, with content sites, rewriting the content of the penalized pages can help, but I don't know what you can do about it as an ecom, but I threw this fix in here, just in case it might help you or someone else... But since this is a spam update (therefore a links-related one), I don't think that rewriting the content helps, but like I said, I'll keep this here, just in case...

Internal links (pretty important nowadays)

There's another issue that I'm noticing after checking some of your blog posts... actually, there is more than one issue, and all of them pertain to internal links...

1) some of the blog posts don't have internal links (ideally, you want ALL of your content pages to have internal links), so make sure that each content page (ie. blog post at least) links to other relevant (also INFORMATIONAL) pages, which brings me to point 2

2) some of the internal links that I did find (although, probably most of them are like this) link to product / category pages, and that's not the purpose of an internal link...

Ok, it can be the purpose of such an internal link if you want to (it's your site so - in a normal world - you can do whatever you want with it). But in the crooked world that we're living in - and given that you want to rank in google - you need to abide by google's rules, which means...

... replace ALL of the internal links that link to commercial pages (ie. product pages or category pages) with internal links to other blog posts, or to other content pages that your traffic might find useful (such as downloadable PDFs, podcast pages, whatever the case may be for your niche and / or type of website.)

And you can link to product pages with a banner or another type of CTA placed at the bottom of the posts... although I'm not sure that it's good to have links to product pages on each one of your blog posts. It might be OK, I don't know, but I'm also not sure, so you need to do more research into this yourself...

3) most of the internal links that I saw look automated, and that's not good if the software / plugin that you're using is crap...

Now, if you have 1000s of content pages you probably don't want to manually go through each one of them to create internal links to other pages, in which case I recommend you either find a better software to create proper internal links, or buy the premium version of whichever software / plugin you're using. And if you're already using the premium version well, this sucks then because the software / plugin is not doing a good job...

Or maybe it's doing the job you specify, in which case you need to change the settings so it can make better links...

And if you don't have a lot of pages I do genuinely recommend that you go through each one of them and create the internal links yourself, and having your visitors in mind.

Also, I didn't take the time to read content (I only skimmed through it so I can see the internal links), but if your content is 100% AI (so, unedited), I recommend that you manually write / re-write it to give it that special human-touch that your readers will enjoy.

I know that there are many people who keep saying that unedited, 100% AI content still ranks fine, but since I'm a passionate hater of the AI and of google I will never recommend anyone to use AI content, so I had to say this :)

Treat your site with love, and care for it, but also for your visitors, and this will impress your readers. The AI can never do this, so make the content 100% human and 100% quality and - even though you might still not rank directly (because google are a bitch and they will always screw you up if they have the opportunity) - your readers will appreciate your site, which can help them spread the word about your site, which will increase your traffic outside of google and which will - eventually - increase your rankings as your site becomes popular, so you will rank indirectly.

Moral of the story: ditch the retarded AI and make all of your content high quality, 100% manually write it, insert all sorts of quality (yet very relevant) images, stats, charts, tables, infographics, etc... all of that crap that google and people love but very few SEOs do...


I could probably say more about this stuff, but I'm getting mentally exhausted as English is not my main language and I've been writing this post for 30 minutes now, so I need a rest.

But you work on the tips that I gave you and - if you're persistent enough - I'm pretty sure you can figure it out and fix the issues yourself...

Also, I just checked your site in GTMetrix (out of personal curiosity more than anything), and I noticed that it's not prolific, speed-wise. So, you might want to do something about this too as sluggish sites have started bothering me too lately, and I used to be one of the few people left on the internet that doesn't care about site speed.

But lately I can't stand them anymore, and if your site's speed bothers even me (the speed is not too slow, though, so you shouldn't have to do a lot of tweaking I think) you can imagine how more impatient people feel having to wait 2-3 seconds for some pages to load :)

Screenshot from 2026-03-07 22-36-31.png



Anyway, this is all I've got for now. If I find anything else that looks suspicious, or if I remember anything that can help I'll let you know...
 
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Most likely an algorithmic spam devaluation (not a manual penalty). Common causes are low-quality content, unnatural backlinks, or duplicate pages, and recovery usually happens only after a future algorithm refresh.
 
Most likely an algorithmic spam devaluation (not a manual penalty). Common causes are low-quality content, unnatural backlinks, or duplicate pages, and recovery usually happens only after a future algorithm refresh.
Do we still need to wait for the next spam algorithm update? Or can we just wait for the core algorithm update?
 
If there’s no manual action, it’s likely an algorithm hit from low-quality links, thin pages, or over-optimized anchors.

These updates usually need a real cleanup plus better content before recovery.

Sometimes recovery only happens after the next big update.
 
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